How to Check for Duplicate Content?

Before we start figuring out whether your content is duplicate or not, let's find out what duplicate content is;

Off-Site Duplicate Content

Off-site duplicate content is when an exact copy of your website content appears on a website with a different address. In such a case, it means that your original content has been copied and published by third parties.

There is not much you can do to remedy this situation except to file a copyright plagiarism report with Google.

On-site Duplicate Content

On-site duplicate content We call duplicate content when two very similar or identical pieces of content appear on multiple pages.

Generally speaking, duplicate content adds little or no value to your website for visitors.

Is Duplicate Content Harmful for Seo?

Duplicate content From an SEO perspective, it harms SEO performance because it confuses search engines by causing them to receive false signals.

If there are more than a dozen duplicate content for a website with hundreds of pages, search engines will not be able to decide exactly which content to use. It will reduce the performance of all pages because it cannot decide which content to show in the search results. Having many pages in this way will cause search engines to lose confidence in the site over time, as search engines will waste the crawling budget.

With the damaged site reliability, getting as high traffic as before means a process that requires a lot of effort.

Duplicate content will greatly hurt your SEO performance, but as long as you don't copy another website's content verbatim, you won't be penalized by Google for duplicate content.

What Are Common Causes of Duplicate Content?

Http and Https problem:

Let's say you are using https as the website infrastructure, but your content can also be accessed from www. extension links, in such a case, you will have duplicate content as a result of poor configuration of your website.

URL structure:

If you have a URL that contains uppercase and lowercase letters and has / lines, google considers URLs with content in this way different and treats your content as duplicate.

Index pages (index.html, index.php):

Again, due to a misconfigured website, your homepage can be accessed via multiple URLs without your knowledge. Thus, your homepage is considered duplicate content.

Duplicate Content Control and Resolution

You can get help from SEO Crawler tools to find out if your content is duplicated. Regularly check your website for technical seo, 301 redirect the duplicate content you detect to the relevant page or redirect the page that is not a priority for you with the same content "canonical" so that these pages will no longer be duplicate content, will not waste your site's crawling budget and will not negatively affect your SEO performance.